A moment, please, to commemorate the passing of one of the real giants in American (and world) culture last Friday. A very nice tribute in last Saturday's New York Times gives most of the details, if you're not one of the cognoscenti -- you may not have known much about him, but you couldn't have lived in this country during the last 50 years without feeling his influence all around you. Wexler coined the phrase "rhythm and blues" to describe the black music being made in the late '40s (which had, prior to that time, been known mostly as "race music"), and he went on to shepherd the careers, and produce the music, by some of the greatest R&B artists ever - Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, the Drifters, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, among many others. [He even produced a Dylan album, "Slow Train Coming," which gets my vote as the best mid-period Dylan out there]. A Bronx-born Jewish white guy, he didn't just help bring a lot of great black music into the "main stream", he actually helped create a great deal of it -- Wexler was a true collaborator, helping to coax a sound and a vision onto vinyl (and the artists themselves, in everything I've read, have always generously credited him with helping them to find their "voice"). Listen to some pre-Wexler Ray Charles, or pre-Wexler Aretha, and you'll get the idea. What a life!
Jerry Wexler, RIP
Jerry Wexler had the chops as well, and could do hands-on production as well as career development. We will not see his like again. Thanks, Jerry, and rest in peace.
. . . but still, what a story! I wish that the Ertegun/Wexler story was as much a part of the popular culture as the "Elvis and Johnny Cash pester Sam Phillips until they get auditions" story. ("Ray" went a little way, though it made Ahmet out to be far more of a nerd than I gather he really was.)
I want to write that next script:
J.W.: "Let me see if I've got this right, kid: you're the son of the Turkish Ambassador to the US, you really like jazz and blues, so you've borrowed some money from your family dentist and you've started a record company?"
That's Duane Allman on the slide behind Aretha. The Stax house band was Booker T &the MGs, for goodness sake! The pinnacle of popular musicianship was to be an anonymous sideman in Muscle Shoals.
He sold a lot of albums to people who consciously bought them to hear the sidemen. I have dozens of albums -- by acts I never would have given a thought to -- because they were recorded at Muscle Shoals or at Stax, or just because they had Jerry Wexler's name on them.
He sold a lot more albums to people who unconsciously bought them for the sidemen: The sidemen transformed a good number into a great number.
That was related to Wexler's basic genius: A deep knowledge of dozens of genres -- blues, gospel, soul, r&b, rockabilly, bluegrass, country, flatpicking -- an ear for a potentially great practitioner in the genre, and the audacity to combine the seemingly unrelated into something extraordinary.
Aretha Franklin was a Memphis girl raised by a Detroit preacher to be a gospel singer. Wexler put her together with a bunch of crackers from Muscle Shoals. What kind of mad genius could conceive that?
PS: Dylan showed the same mad genius by hiring The Band in '64.
PPS: Is "best mid-period Dylan" akin to "best lutefisk"?